Pay Pariah Cults?

When genetic engineering becomes popular, parents are likely to make convergent choices of DNA for their kids. Both by deleting mutations, and by using shared quality DNA estimates. This should increase the DNA adaptiveness of each kid, but lower the variance of DNA in the population. And that should cut the rate at which natural selection of DNA can improve that population or adapt it to changing conditions.

This might not matter much if humans take full effective control over human DNA adaption, displacing prior natural selection. But most seem wary to do this, and there may long remain many things about DNA adaptiveness that we don’t understand. To promote human DNA evolution, maybe we should thus subsidize DNA variance, at least along dimensions that we don’t well understand.

A similar effect is likely already also causing problems with cultural evolution. On average, the members of a culture tend to get more adaptive as that culture moves more toward the average of all world cultures. But the more cultures that do this, the smaller the variance across the set of all human cultures, which then makes it harder for cultural natural selection to improve humanity, or to adapt it to changing conditions.

Alas, we don’t seem very able or inclined to take conscious control over the adaptiveness of our set of cultures. Yes, CEOs do often try to direct the evolution of corporate cultures, but they aren’t good at this. Corporate culture change initiatives take five years and fail two-thirds of the time, and such cultures typically just go bad, which explains why firms on average only last on the S&P500 list for two decades.

If humans were to coordinate effectively to make human cultures more adaptive, we might compensate people for creating and joining viable cultures that differ more from the dominant world monoculture. And which could plausibly maintain such differences, such as via suspicion and insularity. We’d also pay less for shallow less consequential differences like in food, clothes, melodies, story genres, architectures, and furniture. And more for deeper more consequential cultural differences, such as having contrarian stances on war, slavery, democracy, death, and gender equality.

When we have social norms, we typically discourage and punish pariahs who deviate from those norms. And under this adaptiveness promoting regime, we’d continue to discourage uncorrelated deviations. But for large enough coordinated deviations, ones that might plausibly grow and last to become features of substantially different cultures, we’d instead switch to rewarding instead of punishing such deviants.

For example, while Sweden was censured for deviating from world consensus on covid policy, it would instead be celebrated if seen as likely leading to alternate cultures with contrary pandemic policies. Iran is now seen as a pariah for being the only nation that allows organ sales, but it might instead be praised if seen as making a bid to induce contrary cultures on the topic.

A Trump seen as weakening democracy norms is a pariah if he’s a lone deviant, but a hero if he’s the vanguard of new cultures that less value democracy. A Putin seen as a lone defier of world norms against military aggression is also a pariah, but becomes a hero if he’s starting a new deviant culture of aggression. And an Epstein seducing teens was a pariah as a lone sex deviant, but a hero if he was making a whole community with different sex norms.

These examples should make clear the problem: few see the social norms that Epstein (or Putin or Trump) violate as tentative guesses for cultural features that might or might not be adaptive. And thus plausibly benefiting from more experimentation. Most instead see these as well-established moral truths re which deviation is evil and must be crushed. Yes, such moral confidence was likely selected for back when the world had many conflicting cultures, but today such confidence blocks our adaptiveness. Most are far more attached to their specific current culture than they are to than they are to the long term future human adaptiveness.

And in a nutshell, that’s why our dominant world civilization will likely fall over the coming centuries, to be replaced by very different cultures which reject and discard much of what our culture holds dear. Like maybe open inquiry, which I most hold dear. While we can often reason well about “facts”, we just don’t on “values”.

Added 26Nov: Whatever it is that you want to promote in the future, including all of the good things you think follow from our monoculture norms and values, you must tie those good things to an adaptive package. Else they will go away. And yes many big compromises may be required to tie them so.